Winner of the 2001 Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize Seventeenth-century England saw the first capitalist revolution of the modern world, but also the first anti-capitalist revolution. In Ehud’s Dagger, James Holstun reconstructs five radical projects of the time in a stirring development of Marxist “history from below.” A Caroline prologue examines the political and poetic furore surrounding John Felton, who assassinated the Duke of Buckingham in 1628, creating a republican cause célèbre for circulators of verse libels. Holstun then turns to the Revolution proper, focusing on the common soldiers of the Puritan New Model Army, who formed a military soviet in the summer of 1647 and bested their capitalist officers in debate; the Fifth Monarchist visionary Anna Trapnel, who publicly prophesied against the Protectorate on behalf of sectarian small producers; the Leveller theorist and desperado Edward Sexby, who wrote the brilliant tyrannicidal treatise Killing Noe Murder, and attempted to assassinate Cromwell; and the agrarian communist Diggers of Surrey, whose comrade and leader Gerrard Winstanley was the foremost social theorist of seventeenth-century England. “This remarkable book offers both a passionate engagement with the concrete processes sof political struggle in the English Revolution and a powerful critique of current theoretical models in historiography and literary theory. Intellectually alive from start to finish, Holstun's book captures the polemical energy of the early modern period he discusses.” … David Nordbrook, Merton Chair of English Literature, Oxford University “Ehud's Dagger brings the vents of the Civil War period and the ordinary people who made them to life.” — Observer “Thoroughly thought-provoking…” — History “Holstun writes with a meticulous attention to historical detail, evoking the sense of peering into the past through a window in time.” — Reviewer's Bookwatch “Basing his book on wide reading and deep thought, James Holstun has produced a comprehensive critical analysis of historical and literary theories relating to the English Revolution.“— Socialist Review James Holstun teaches in the English Department at the State University of New York in Buffalo. His previous books include A Rational Millennium and Pamphlet Wars.	Publication Cloth: December 2000 Paper: November 2002 512 pages Cloth 1 85984 782 XX US$40 / ¢27 / CAN$55 Paper 1 85984 407 3 US$21 / £15 / CAN$34